indessed roscivs

At the end of last Thursday’s post, I ended with the statement, “[Hollywood fakery is] not going to change, but hopefully our awareness of it will.”

I was referring to much more with that comment than simply digital doctoring of movies. Every single image we’re presented with—television, magazines, movies, billboards—has been retouched, altered, and manipulated so much as to be almost unrecognizable as the original. The benefit I think we have over yesteryear, when camera tricks and make-up were the primary methods of making things appear as something they aren’t, is that we can be aware of the fact that what we’re seeing is fake. The human images we’re seeing have been altered so much as to appear drastically closer to some non-existent ideal of perfection than the original flawed human that they (and each of us) are.

But mere rational knowledge of the trickery, unfortunately, doesn’t help our human brains much. When we see a cute girl walking down the street, we still subconsciously compare her with the non-existent façade we see the Hollywood stars present. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we think that—if only we were to work out a little more, or stop eating a certain thing—we really could look like that. The blessing of the Internet age is that we no longer have to be content with mere rational knowledge; we can see first-hand the extent of the subterfuge.

Take, for example, a typical retouching portfolio. This is the image we see in the media. This is what the person really looks like. (Well, it’s what she looks like with makeup, posing, and camera angles already in play. Seeing her walking down the street would take it yet another step closer to reality.) As you click through the images in the portfolio, some of the changes are more subtle, but every single one of them is an image burned into your mind forever of the power of the digital airbrush.

I could write for another dozen paragraphs details of how exactly the manipulation is done, detailing the tricks and techniques of the field, but no amount of words and rationally understanding how and why it’s done will affect you as much as seeing, exactly, how beauty is made:

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 10:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.